'whoop' for 'whip' via 'whup'?

This substitution of ‘whoop’ for ‘whip’ is firmly attached to physical punishment or damage; other senses of ‘whip’ remain untouched, eg noone seems to be whooping up batter mixes and suchlike. I imagine we got to this use of whoop by its similarity to the ‘whip’ variant ‘whup’. The unrestrained joy of the original sense of ‘whoop’ does not seem to have been lost in its transfer to an often savage physical assault – I find something particularly unpleasant about the cry of exultation which seems to accompany the use of this expression and disguises its true nature.
(There are nearly 400 googlehits for ‘whoop his arse’ and as they don’t seem to be UK based it appears that ‘arse’ might be making a comeback in North America? It’s losing ground fast in the UK…)

I’m usually up at the 54 with Eddie and my main man Rick James, but sometimes he gets out of control and i have to whoop his ass whoop his ass whoop his ass …
profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=139791241 – 147k – Cached

this kid: cj philpot, called brett and said he was a dead man and that he was gonna whoop his ass. brett has a horrible temper, and got super pissed and …
blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=21085209&blogID=171580240&MyToken=e8… – 16k – Cached